We are doing this awesome short at my work. We bought Vue Infinite to generate the terrain. I made an ecosystem and exported it to .3ds. But when I open it in 3ds max the trees arent there. Why? Whats the optimal settings to get the best result?

Ecosystems can't be exported. See them as highly Infinite specific material that only Vue can deal with. Simply think of the billions of polygons Max would have to deal with. The ideal solution for you will be xFusion. This will allow you to run Infinite natively INSIDE Max. It is in beta status right now, you maybe want to go to e-ons site to get more information about it.

Cool! Thanx! So the best thing to do (without xFusion) is to create a terrain, some trees (nearest camera)and export them to 3ds max. And the vegetation far away from the camera will be made of lo poly ojects? Got a bit scarred when I saw the polycount :-D

Hmmmm...wonder if there is a trial or beta version to try?

For xFusion? Is not out yet - last phase of beta as i understood it. You are lucky, i think first version to be fired out will be Max. But i am not fully updated on that right now, some reading at E-ons site can help! The original plan for release is "end of the year"

Why not make instances in 3ds of vue trees or even better 3ds trees. I don't think 3ds benefits from vue at all. There are many plugns that do and work with 3ds better than vue.

What's great about Vue trees, is that they are all different from one another thanks to the solidgrowth technology. Instancing in another app will always produce the same tree, maybe with size & rotation variations. xFusion might be your answer if you can spend the extra 500$.

We talked to our boss the other day and he agreed to get xFusion. Think we solved it this way: Well make distance renderings of the landscapes and map them on planes in Max, export some trees and place them nearest the camera. For more distance trees, well use some planes with planar maps on them. Some animations will be mad inside of Vue, but the character animatios will be mad in max...of course. Well see how it goes. Thanx!